There seem to be a lot of enthusiasts of this kind of idea, and certainly there must be 100 people like this here on this forum in the US. Can they point me to one such one here that is high performance?
Plus or minus tiny details, the description from the article:
A demand co-op is a cooperative that pools and directs the spending power of its members. Demand determines what gets built, who survives, and where wealth flows. Most communities already have enormous spending power, but because that demand is unorganized, the value created from it is captured by outside businesses and investors. A demand co-op coordinates that spending so economic activity can build communal businesses, assets, and long-term ownership instead of constant leakage.
covers a multitude. Eg: CBH from the 1930s onwards has pooled the spending power of grain farmers into building out farmer owned transportation networks (rail, ports, shipping, large scale silo storage) as communal assets and source of jobs for relatives and communities.
Thank you for sharing. I'm also familiar with Mondragon in Spain as a cooperative - similarly an agricultural one primarily. When I said "here" in the sentences "...there must be 100 people like this here on this forum in the US. Can they point me to one such one here..." I was referring to the US.
> Here is relative, I'm here on the forum and here in W.Australia.
That's true. "Here" doesn't mean anything on its own. I gathered as much from your response. I was clarifying what I was curious about because clearly I'd attached my "in the US" in my original comment to the wrong phrase.
> There's nothing preventing co-ops from operating in the US other than culture.
Right, and this is why I was curious. It seemed to me that while there is nothing preventing this from happening, and while there are many commenters here who are expressing that they'd like one, I haven't really heard of one. In the US, of course.
Yep, that's the US (sadly) where apparently any form of social policy, general cooperation, long term planning, etc. gets torn down under the guise of equating to communism.
Weirdly, CBH is almost equivalent to a US style company in many ways - just that the major shareholders are all equal voting co owners with skin (well, land) in the game.
Which is very different to what an IT / programmer collective might look like - the assets are the intangible skills and knowledge that members bring to the table.
We (Australia) also do Men's Sheds which are often co-op type structures - place for blokey types to hang and build stuff as they get older - some of their projects can get largish in scale.
There's certainly room and scope to drag a few NAS boxen and community services (photo archiving, free to air public broadcast mirroring and on demand streaming, drone mapping and GIS path maintaining, etc.) into local area Men's Sheds.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBH_Group